(CNN) -- When Dr. Carolyn LaFleur was in a car accident six years ago, she couldn't move her neck for a year and a half, she had terrible pain in her hip, and she would get headaches at her temples.

Frequent icing, physical therapy and massage therapy helped her neck and hip, but didn't do much for the pain in her head.

Then just last year LaFleur discovered yoga. While it didn't get rid of her headaches, it did make the pain much more manageable.

"Yoga has given me strength," says LaFleur, 66, an anesthesiologist who practices in Hudson, New York.

She has her yoga "prescribed" by Dr. Loren Fishman, a rehabilitative medicine specialist at Columbia University's New York-Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan.

"Yoga lowers your tension. It relaxes the basic tone of your muscle," he says. "And the minute you notice that yoga helps, it raises your confidence that you can help yourself. It gives you the feeling of 'I can do it.' "

Fishman and others have done studies showing yoga can help all sorts of medical ailments, from depression to sexual dysfunction to rotator cuff injuries.

"People often have a hard time believing they can get such powerful change from yoga, but they do," says Dr. Dean Ornish, who has studied the health benefits of yoga.

Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, says yoga works by bringing down stress levels, which relaxes everything in your body, including blood vessels.

Fishman suggested to LaFleur that she do the camel pose, the bridge pose and the wheel pose for headaches. He says these poses stretch the muscles in the front of the chest, which help control the head. The Yoga Journal has more information on yoga for headaches.

According to the "Harvard Mental Health Letter," a study at the University of Utah showed people who practice yoga had a higher pain tolerance than those who didn't.

10. Depression and anxiety

A German study mentioned in the same Harvard publication showed that emotionally distressed women became less depressed and anxious after they took two 90-minute yoga classes a week for three months. This yoga journal article suggests camel pose, bridge pose and wheel pose.